Intel increases Windows driver size to boost Starfield shader compilation load times

For those following the news surrounding Bethesda's Starfield, which is arguably one of the biggest games of the year, you are probably aware that the title has been optimized for AMD, which is why it runs the best on Radeon hardware, especially with the driver version 23.8.2. And while Nvidia also has had its own driver, benchmarks do show that Team Red is performing better than Team Green GPUs, especially at the Ultra preset.

Meanwhile, over on the Team Blue camp, things haven't been any good, like at all. Users have reported different kinds of issues like extremely slow load times, texture corruptions, and more, essentially making the game unplayable. In the worst-case scenario, the game isn't even launching for some.

Today, Intel has released its Windows beta driver for Arc which tackles some of these issues like slow loading times and texture issues. The company notes that the driver package size has been increased to ~685MB from the typical ~635MB. This additional 50MB might be due to how the driver is now handling pre-cached and pre-compiled shaders which will help to reduce the loading times. This should also help in those situations where the game even fails to launch due to failure in compiling shaders.

The full release notes for Intel Arc beta driver version 31.0.101.4672 are given below:

• Graphics Driver package has temporarily increased to significantly reduce the Starfield* game load duration.
• Several Starfield* game instability and visual artifacts have been fixed in this driver. High Preset and below is recommended to improve stability.
• Efforts in progress to further improve overall gaming experience of Starfield* for Intel® Arc™ users in future driver updates.

GAMING HIGHLIGHTS: Intel® Game On Driver support on Intel® Arc™ A-series Graphics for:

• SYNCED*

FIXED ISSUES:

Intel® Arc™ Graphics Products:

• Starfield* (DX12) Game load duration is significantly reduced.
• Starfield* (DX12) may experience instability and application crash while launching and during gameplay.
• Starfield* (DX12) may exhibit texture corruptions and scene flickers during gameplay.

KNOWN ISSUES:

Intel® Arc™ Graphics Products:

• Starfield* (DX12) may experience application instability in some areas of the game.
• Starfield* (DX12) may exhibit corruption when using Dynamic Resolution Scaling. A workaround is to change the Render Resolution Scale slider value.
• Starfield* (DX12) may exhibit texture flickering on light sources during gameplay.
• Starfield* (DX12) may exhibit low texture details on certain objects in the game.
• UNCHARTED: Legacy of Thieves Collection* (DX12) may exhibit texture corruption on characters.
• Halo Infinite* (DX12) campaign may experience an application crash on some system configurations.
• Dead by Daylight* (DX11) may experience an application crash during gameplay.
• Topaz Video AI* may experience errors when using some models for video enhancement.
• Adobe After Effects* may experience an application crash during render operations.
• Device fan may ramp up frequently on certain Intel® Arc™ Graphics products.

Intel® Iris™ X e MAX Graphics Products:

• Driver installation may not complete successfully on certain notebook systems with both Intel® Iris™ Xe + Iris™ Xe MAX devices. A system reboot and re-installation of the graphics driver may be required for successful installation.

INTEL® ARC™ CONTROL KNOWN ISSUES:

• Using Arc Control Studio capture with certain games may incorrectly generate multiple video files.
• The “Connector” type in the Display page may incorrectly show DP* when using an HDMI* display connection.
• May observe “stream has already ended” pop-up after the power events with Capture/Highlights/Broadcast toggle on.
• Performance Graphs may scale incorrectly after waking up from sleep.

To download the new Arc 31.0.101.4672 beta driver, head over to this page on Intel's official website.

Source